If you’re standing in the queue for the Science Museum on Exhibition Road you might spot this inscription above the large and imposing archway opposite:
SCIENCE AND ART DEPARTMENT
SCHOOLS ** MUSEUM
A.D. 1852
The date is misleading because the building – now the Henry Cole Wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum – was constructed between 1899 and 1909.
I was seven years old when I first joined the queue at the Science Museum (I can be sure of the date because I remember a poster for Kirk Douglas’s film ‘The Vikings’ – released in August 1958 – on hoardings around the Natural History Museum gardens).
The Royal College of Art
At that time there was an arts and crafts-style mosaic in the frame to the right of the archway. Several muses reclined elegantly beneath an inscription indicating that this was then the ‘Royal College of Art’.